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You don't have any credit card debt, but do you have credit cards? Two reasons I ask. One is that 18% auto loan is absolutely murderous, and it's harder to justify having cash sitting around for an emergency when it could be paying that loan down. If you have credit available, I'd say your case is a strong one for using springy debt as part of your emergency fund. The other is that if you use cards regularly and have just been paying them off, you can look through your past statements online to get a better idea of your historical spending habits. If you sign up for a site like Mint, it'll even categorize it all for you. I find Mint and YNAB work very well together.
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Nov 23, 2013 01:24
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 12:08 |
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Hope I'm not continuing to veer too far off into Games territory here, but you can also look at the games you want (and other forms of entertainment too) quantitatively by realistically estimating how many hours of entertainment they'll provide and then calculating your cost per hour. If you drop $60 on a brand-new single player adventure that you get through in eight hours and it has no replay value, that's equivalent to seeing four or five movies in the theater at $7.50 per hour. You're not in a position to go see five movies on a whim, so you shouldn't be buying brand new games like that either. Right now roguelike-ish games are popular with indie developers. In addition to being cheaper titles with low hardware demands to begin with, they're also extremely replayable on account of featuring newly randomly-generated levels every time you play. I dropped four bucks on The Binding of Isaac on a Steam sale last year and I've logged about a hundred hours on it since without quite 100%=ing the game yet and it still hasn't gotten old. At $0.04 per hour of entertainment, that's been four bucks very well spent.
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Dec 3, 2013 08:37
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Knyteguy posted:Credit Card: $1574.55. Wells Fargo said that if we pay it off in one lump sum this month we only have to pay $1,000. Should we budget $500 of our emergency fund now and then $500 next check cycle? That saves us almost $600! It will reflect as balance paid in full on her credit report. I say go for it, that's a 57% return on your "investment". It frees up the credit card to be used as springy debt as well so it doesn't hit your ability to withstand an emergency as much, assuming they don't close your account once you pay it off.
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Dec 6, 2013 22:23
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Me in Reverse posted:If they are offering to knock $500+ off his balance for a full payment he is at the collections phase of this credit card's lifespan and will not be getting any further credit from them... Yeah, I didn't think that one through. My bad. Knyteguy posted:It was this exactly. They're just Wells Fargo collecting on behalf of Wells Fargo. Any input on whether we should let it say "settled" and save $600 or just pay it in full for "balance paid in full" or just let it be sold to an outside firm and forget it for now? I'm irritated that they tried to trick my wife saying it would be balance paid in full no matter what, or whatever. She had to call back to clarify after she told me the whole situation. The damage to your credit report has likely been done already. If it's already been marked as a charge-off, and it almost certainly has, then "settled" isn't really going to hurt much more, and "paid in full" isn't going to rescue it. edit: Letting it go to an actual collections agency would make it worse, however. Kilty Monroe fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 01:41
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Getting a pay-for-delete agreement from an original creditor like Wells Fargo is pretty much impossible. Pay-for-delete isn't illegal, but the credit bureaus don't like it because their job is to give an accurate representation of the risk to creditors in lending to you, and when tradelines get swept under the rug like that then it compromises the validity of their report. Creditors are supposed to report all credit information to them honestly, and while getting some scumbag third-party debt collector to agree to it is one thing, you've got about a snowball's chance in hell of getting Wells Fargo to go against their relationship with the credit bureaus for you over less than six hundred bucks. I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask, but don't be surprised if you hear laughter on the other end.
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Dec 7, 2013 07:33
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Knyteguy posted:So we went and financed a new 60" television from Best Buy today. They told us there was interest free financing for two years on any purchase $1,000 and over, so we figured it was like free money and said screw it. We really needed a second television for the Playstation 4. Dammit, you really had me for a minute here. Regarding the chest freezer: You have to be careful with things where you spend now to save later, when what you really need is to save now. But you've done it while staying within your original grocery budget (or close enough) so... good job. It might be tough at first transitioning to your new frugal diet. You've already spent your grocery budget, so really do your best to tough it out for these first two weeks. It'll get easier as it goes. If after these two weeks it feels like something you can really commit to, this can be a really good step forward for you.
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Dec 8, 2013 13:49
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Yeah, throwing yourself into a whole new line of work on nothing more than a salary estimate rarely ends well. She can do some more research in the meantime, and then after all your debt is paid off she can try to break in to it if she's still interested. It seems like much of your approach to getting on top of your finances is "what can I buy that will help us make/save more money in the long run?" That's not a saving perspective, that's an investment perspective, and you are not in a place to be making risky investments that may not turn out. I know people that have thought the same way that ended up doing stuff like filling their homes with craftmaking poo poo trying to sell things on Etsy and ended up digging themselves far deeper than they ever made off of it. The keys to getting your finances back under control are finding happiness within a frugal lifestyle, developing a healthy cynicism of consumer culture, and time. Nothing more.
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Dec 12, 2013 03:40
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 12:08 |
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You (probably) don't need new knives, you just need to sharpen the ones you've got. Even with the best knives, honing will only do so much and you'll eventually need to grind a new edge with a whetstone. Google for a knife sharpening service in your area, or even a mail-in service. It'll be a lot cheaper than a whole new knife set (not that anybody needs a complete knife "set" either, but that's a whole other rant).
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Jan 30, 2014 07:29
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